Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  —Pepper. It’s a game, my father taught me, more of a drill, where balls are tossed from a short distance, less than the distance here, which is sixty feet six inches, by the way, twenty meters or so, and the batter is meant to just make contact, just hit it, a controlled tap back to the pitcher or some other fielder surrounding him. It’s meant to sharpen the batter’s eye, and coordination.

  —The other side’s good at that game.

  —Too bad for them [laughing] it’s not the sport.

  —Perhaps these two squads should form their own association. Head-and-head.

  Beckett’s mind was suffused with literary forms, styles, cadences. To escape tradition, he had to leave his native language, English, for the language of his adopted country, French, in order to get away from any inherited literary “style.” Name an important writer who has made such a move for such a reason; name a writer, regardless of importance, who has made such a move for such a reason. Well, you probably cannot. No doubt his lucky apprenticeship with James Joyce (who spoke eleven languages and took on literary styles only to then shred them) daubed Beckett thickly with ambition, certainly with an understanding that an artist could—should—abandon tradition to find what was new and necessary. Beckett, like Joyce, was a modernist. Perhaps the last, as biographer Anthony Cronin argues.

  Talib ben Sehl, on the other hand, ascends to take the jewels from the damsel, the white mace-bearer smites his back, and the black swordsman cuts off his head. “May God,” says the governor, “have no mercy on thy soul! Indeed, there was enough in these treasuries, and to covet assuredly dishonor a man.” All depart, and they shut the gates as before. The expedition comes to a nation of blacks that are true believers, having been taught by a man that came out of the sea, from whom a light issued that illumined the whole horizon. The king of these people sends out divers, who return with twelve vessels sealed with Solomon’s seal, as well as several mermaids, whereafter the company, having achieved their purpose, return to Damascus.

  Phil and Susan talked out in the hall. I saw Susan put her hand over her mouth and look at Phil like he had said something awful. We figured we’d find out soon enough, even too soon, so Henry and I tossed his hacky sack back and forth while one of the girls looked at us weird. Zack took out his Sports Illustrated. Oliver slipped about five sticks of gum into his mouth. Then Susan came back in, her lips pressed tight, looking at us, sort of, but over our heads, out the window. This is how she looked when she was what she called flummoxed, looking for an answer to something, like when she found the trash basket half full of milk and a couple of pencils floating there, yesterday.

  —For crissakes, a late rally. That ball’s fair. Christopher into second!

  —We’re awake.

  —Just wait. . . . Pitching change.

  —A new bowler at last. Long innings. That organist, for fuck’s sake!

  Did Beckett “fail better,” as he wished? Did he drill holes in the language, as he said a contemporary writer must, and if he did, what seeped through? Is it Being? Back unsay shades can go. Go and come again. No. Shades cannot go. Much less come again. Nor bowed old woman’s back. . . .

  The khalif opens the vessels one by one. Devils emerge, crying, “We repent, O prophet of God!” and the khalif marvels at the power of Solomon. Tanks are constructed for the mermaids, but they die of the heat. The khalif divides the spoils of the City of Brass among the faithful. And the governor, bestowing his office on his son, goes to Jerusalem, to worship God, where he remains till his death. This, then, is all that has come down to us of the story of the City of Brass.

  I say to her this tale. She feigns sleep. But I am an impostor, too, poured in brass.

  Then she started to talk and just as she was getting our attention we couldn’t hear what she was saying. There were sirens blaring and the big honk that fire trucks make when they are trying to move traffic out of the way. She walked in a trot, then she slowed down, over to the window, and tried to close it, still talking. She was talking about a thing that had happened that involved us having to get back to school work. I pocketed Henry’s hacky sack, and we welcomed what seemed like a little break in our discussion of colonial America. But then Phil came back in, with the headmaster next to him, and they spoke to Susan with their hands out, as if saying, “Stay.” So we stayed. Susan said she would be right back. She asked us all to read the Magna Carta in our books.

  —You see, smart move. Woodeshick calmed the waters. And Frank Thomas is a tough man to get out. Three strikes.

  —[Drawing out the syllables] Woodeshick?

  —Not that kid coming up . . . Hickman now. Maybe our best player.

  —A replacement?

  —Pinch hitter we call it.

  —No one to catch that on the fly!

  —Runs scores. Now two-zip, Mets.

  —An obscene margin!

  . . . Nor old man and child. Nor foreskull and stare. Blur yes. Shades can blur. When stare clamped to one alone. Or somehow words again. Go no nor come again. Till dim if ever go. Never to come again. Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then.

  Will fiction keep the truth at bay or usher it forth? Does truth usher forth fiction or keep it at bay? Are these two real questions or two fictive ones? Or one of each, and if so, which is which? Are these propositions exhaustive of all possibilities? No. Truth, say, might both usher fiction forth and keep it at bay. Similarly, fiction might do the same to truth. The twilight of delusion, perhaps. Dreams of truth. I am dead, no one knows it. I am here, same deal, same dead.

  I raised my hand—I think I did—and told her I’d left my textbook at home and she didn’t even see me. So we all, most of us anyway, just fooled around for ten minutes or so. Then Susan came back and we read the Magna Carta—or she did—out loud. But Maria’s mom showed up and talked to Susan near the door and then left with Maria. Then Vio’s dad came, and then we realized something was up, like a big fire or something. Phil showed up again and addressed the class. His shirt sleeves were rolled but he was very calm, except he rubbed his hands together more than usual, like he was washing them. I don’t remember what Phil said. Oliver’s father, Andrew, showed up in a sharp suit—he’s in the music business—and he took charge and told me I was going back with them, that he’d call Mom and Dad. He said the World Trade Center had been hit by two planes. I couldn’t wait to see what this was about, but when we got to the lobby of the school, I got scared. Parents and kids were mixed in there and it was as if everyone wanted to rush out but wanted to stay, like they didn’t know what to do.

  —Stengel is letting the pitcher bat. The Old Professor.

  —God, not an academic running things. . . .

  —They call him the professor, because he talks in circles.

  —It’s that simple? Professor . . . Stengel?

  —He was a genius, when he managed great players, with the Yankees, not that long ago.

  —There was a Professor Stengel married a great Polish soprano.

  —No relation, I’m sure, Casey’s from Kansas City, hence Kay-Cee.”

  While visiting his mother in Dublin after the war, Beckett had a “revelation” (his word), an experience recounted poetically if cryptically in Krapp’s Last Tape: “ . . . that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. . . . [C]lear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.” Beckett was forty and had already published his stories, several poems, and the novel Murphy. In short order he would go on to compose the postwar works that have made him such a large figure, but one need look only at chapter 6 in Murphy, finished years before, in 1935, to see that his revelation was of a reality already within him, at a deep level, the third
of “three zones,” of which Murphy was conscious, it appears, and so, we may assume, was Beckett. He describes “Murphy’s Mind” thus: “The third, the dark [zone], was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. . . . [N]othing but forms becoming and crumbling into fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom.”

  In the dark. In the dusk. In the wake. In the gloaming. All is seen, in the dark, in the dusk, in the wake, in the gloaming. In the dark. In the dusk. In the wake. In the gloaming.

  Andrew seemed like he knew what to do, but that was reassuring only for a minute, because he greeted every other parent with a serious shake of the head, in a very disapproving way. When we got to the sidewalk, we could sense something really bad had happened. Sirens were screaming. Traffic on Sixth Avenue was clogged. And to our left, there were the towers, both with dark gray smoke pouring out of them, like they were on fire. Getting across town on foot wasn’t easy. There was not only the traffic, but people walking uptown, half-running. It was as crowded as on Halloween, when the parade goes through and people come from all over to see it. When we got to Seventh Avenue, all the cars were gone.

  —And the pitcher hits! That’s in. Three to nothing.

  —Insurmountable, if recent events are any judge.

  —Have you heard any music here? It’s a good jazz town.

  Beckett’s “vision at last,” reported variously to have occurred on the East pier in Dún Laoghaire (by Eoin O’Brien) and “my mother’s room” (Beckett himself, to Knowlson), was perhaps there all along. But this vision or revelation is a sort that is worn as a burden—all these tumbling forms (“great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller,” from Krapp) constituting “the dark of absolute freedom” (Murphy) demand a certain posture toward self and expression. Beckett put it perfectly in Murphy, of Murphy: “Here he was not free. . . . He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line.” That is, “you must go on, I can’t go, I’ll go on”—the formulation that draws to a close The Unnamable, twenty years later in a changed world, a postwar world, but still a Beckett world. The question of Being’s relationship to form continues as central to his practice.

  Nothing is seen, in the dark, in the dusk, in the wake, in the gloaming. What is seen is the dark. The dusk. The wake. The gloaming.

  We could look all the way to our right, uptown, toward St. Vincent’s—no cars. But there were beds, like stretchers, out front of the hospital, right in the street. But looking downtown, down Seventh Avenue, there was a wall of people coming toward us, like out of a horror movie. There was smoke behind them, there was smoke coming off them. They were gray like they were dead.

  —Jazz . . . ? Only at Barney’s, in his Quonset hut out there. On the phonograph. I take to my room.

  Eventually, Beckett’s formulations embraced failure, more importantly, the sustaining of failure (going on), as a goal. Sustaining failure is the art of living—this is Beckett’s key philosophical, biological, and literary insight—facing failure and not surrendering to its darkness. “I see my light dying,” says Clov rather defiantly to the unsighted Hamm when asked why he is staring at the wall.

  These appalling reductions! What remains? Give me the remainder.

  When we got to Oliver’s apartment in the Archive Building, near the river, we went into his room and took two Cokes with us. Oliver had some cool things, so this was okay. It seemed strange to be there during the day, though—with his father all dressed up and on the phone in the kitchen.

  —Let’s see if the home team can close this out.

  Is this what makes us lovable?

  What’s the remainder?

  I wondered where my parents were.

  IX.

  —That fellow’s very deft.

  For Beckett, the high priest of failure—“fail better,” “like none other dare fail,” “better worse,” “say nohow on”—what are we to make of the works he abandoned?

  The remainder is comedy.

  After we played a few games—we shot baskets into his hoop, fooled around online, and then played with his remote-control cars, we got on his bed and looked out his window, which had a view from high up of the Hudson River and the highway that runs along it.

  —Roy McMillan. One of the best at his position.

  —Hoovers everything up.

  —One out to go.

  Did Beckett’s abandoned work, of which there are a dozen or so—abandoned plays, radio scripts, essays, poems, translations, and a few prose pieces—not fail enough? Did they fail the test of failure? Else why abandoned? Did they edge toward success, or some facile form of failure, or were they abandoned because their ambitions for failure were too grand, the failure envisioned unattainable or the execution too poorly conceived?

  What’s left over is comedy. It is strictly human. Henri Bergson said that.

  Coming down the highway were nothing but EMS vehicles and fire trucks. We turned on the TV and had trouble finding a station that was working but then found CNN and we sat watching. I got butterflies in my stomach.

  —So what do you make of this filmmaking, Sam?

  —The movie part of it. The camera moving, the eye. It changes possibilities. Narrator on a dolly.

  —Next stop, Hollywood!

  Or were there landscapes of failure that Beckett considered too dark to traverse, prompting retreat? An afternoon in the Beckett archive at the University of Reading reading the six pages of his abandoned prose work “Long Observation of the Ray,” from 1976, written in English in his small, slanted hand and a series of typewritten drafts, suggests to me that there is indeed a place too dark for Beckett. This elaborately schemed piece—meant to cover nine “themes” in precise mathematically determined packets of sentences, with a structure described by Steven Connor, one of only two scholars who have written on “Long Observation,” as proceeding in “exactly equivalent increment(s) and diminishment(s), consisting of one sentence referring to each” of the nine themes . . . followed by “a sequence of three sentences referring to” the nine themes, “followed by similar sequence of six, nine, six and three sentences,” concluding with another sequence of one sentence each “from the nine themes,” was worked on by Beckett for over the span of a year before being dropped. “Long Observation of the Ray” attempts to describe the play of light (from a lantern) within a hermetic spherical chamber six feet in diameter, and how the light can be made to wash with equal intensity the entire surface from an identical distance, which is required for the intensity to remain constant. Beckett encounters and fiddles with many of the epistemological and technical problems this scheme presents. He is trying to hold constant a closed system with the light source not biasing what it illuminates. The second essay on this mysterious piece, by David Houston-Jones, hints at a possible reason.

  “An animal which laughs,” Bergson said, of us. The comic occurs in the absence of feeling, Bergson said. “Laughter has no greater foe than emotion,” he said. But laughter has a social function—it “stands in need of an echo.” We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us?

  Andrew came in. Oliver and I chewed gum. Dad showed up. Dad talked to Andrew for a while and then Dad asked Andrew if he had any whiskey. Andrew did, and Dad soon had a glass in his hand.

  —I wrote Jackie a note. Not an idea in my head but I can see something . . . with Jackie MacGowran in it.

  —Jack’s been very busy, hasn’t he?

  —Yes, blessedly. He’s a danger to himself at all times, but when idl
e, it worsens. He despairs.

  —He’s one of the best. He couldn’t do Film?

  —Just too many commitments, I’d have loved it, but I’d have been sent home in a box.

  “Beckett’s later work,” writes Houston-Jones, “is preoccupied with a world running down to zero.” Beckett’s interest is in “what survives the disappearance of the human species.” The work is “rooted” in William Thompson’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, according to which energy in a closed system is gradually lost, resulting in stabilization at absolute zero. Beckett’s abandoned piece, Houston-Jones proposes, emerges as a picture of “human survival in informational form.” This is Beckett perhaps trying to design an object that can realize in some fashion James Maxwell’s thought experiment, in which the Second Law is refuted by having a door through which slowing and therefore cooling particles can be exchanged for accelerating and therefore warming particles within, keeping energy constant. Beckett’s sphere and lantern and ray arguably have a go at this. But given the concerns of the late Beckett work, I might side with Steven Connor who sees “Long Observation” as Beckett’s attempt to remove the theatrical from art, and from theater, to purify its abstraction. To get at what? Toward being? The shape of being?

  I said to her, tell me a joke. I said to her, make it funny. I said to her, let’s be light, the light in our future. The light ahead. I said to her, you see it, don’t you? Close your eyes, you will see it. I said to her, if you can see it, tell me about it. Be my echo, I will hear it, you back to me. You back to me.

  It was still morning. I always thought drinking was something grownups did to celebrate, like New Year’s or a birthday, not the collapse of buildings or whatever this was. They were calling it a terrorist act on TV. America had been attacked. Maybe you did drink to that. Dad borrowed Andrew’s cell phone because he had to make some calls, he said, and Andrew was on the land line. I had to help Dad work the cell, since he was bad at technology. I wondered if most adults were drinking somewhere.